Friday, June 1, 2012

A Real Human Being and a Real Hero

I will never forget when I snapped a person’s jaw in half
with garden clippers. No, this is not an account of a murder of a review notes
cadge. This is anatomy lab, a place full of magic, mystery and liquefied fat
stains on your scrubs. It also has the added bonus of testing the validity of
any violent fantasies one has ever had; no better way to find out what serial
killing is like than to systematically disassemble a human in the name of
science.

My cadaver was a wispy old woman, Ellie, whom I grew to
love. One of the hardest moments of med school and maybe even my life was to
put all of her pieces in a body bag and say goodbye. We gave her flowers. Truthfully
there were days that I did not want to be there. I did not want to clean out
her thoracic cavity full of congealed mucus (which has the consistency of
spoiled cottage cheese). Nor did I want to tie off her intestines with plastic
neon-pink ribbon, normally used to wrap presents, before removing her bowels
and praying to every deity that I would not perforate them and spill out
formaldehyde-preserved waste. But I never forgot her sacrifice to us. Thus I’ve
decided that when I die I want to donate my body to a bunch of incompetent med
students that will massacre it, although I plan to tattoo some helpful hints on
myself to guide them.

Lab is also an especially terrible place for hangovers.
After a post exam shindig people are seen darting out for oxygen breaks far
more than usually. The occasional overachiever can be observed with an airplane
style vomit baggie sticking out of his lab coat pocket. I’ve always felt especially
badly for the groups that had the poorly preserved bodies, which were basically
decomposing corpses they had the pleasure of digging through. Walk by that and
keep your lunch. I dare you.

For the few moments I wanted to steal one of those vomit
baggies, there were many more majestic ones. I held a human heart, many hearts
actually, and removed the brain, which proved to be a difficult task – it’s
really stuck in there. I saw the intricacy of human hand, a surprisingly simple
system considering that we can write, paint, touch and profoundly manipulate our
world because of our hands. I used my hands to delicately dissect the neck with
miniscule scissors, working for hours to unveil the astounding complexity of the
machinery that helps run our face and brain. The irony is that for all of impressive
things our body is and can do, it is a very unassuming lump of beige meat.